Asked about the industry’s reactions to this report, Loudiadis says, “Although we’ve shared this report only with a few network service providers so far, they’re loving it.” App developers called the report “an eye-opener,” while hardware box designers are calling it “huge,” she adds.

Stressing that Alcatel-Lucent, too, is a hardware box vendor, Loudiadis says, “Our hardware guys use it to understand the future of networks, [their] growth rate, and the increasing load their systems need to handle.”

Key metrics
To create the analytics in this report, Alcatel-Lucent measured two key metrics: “data volume” and “signaling consumption” -- each demanded by different mobile apps. In its view, both metrics are critical in probing the impact of the mobile apps’ misbehavior.

But how exactly do these analytics help companies in the mobile world improve their business? Loudiadis shared with us one high-profile case: Facebook.

Facebook’s ambition to expand its business to the mobile world is well known. At the Mobile World Congress earlier this year Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urged mobile operators to zero-rate Facebook. He told operators that Facebook can bring the Internet to the next 2 billion users, concurrently boosting operators’ profits.

The argument wouldn’t have flown had Facebook been stuck where it was a year ago. It turns out Facebook last year learned that its app, unexpectedly, increased overall signaling load as much as 10% overnight with the company’s new software release. Such a spike spells bad news for operators, because they know it will cost their networks. Facebook at that time had no idea how this happened, let alone what to fix.

When Alcatel-Lucent blogged about some of the findings of the company’s analytics last year, Facebook saw the blog post, and “they called us,” said Loudiadis.

In their efforts to trace the culprit, the Alcatel-Lucent team members and Facebook staff found the signaling spike was caused by misbehavior by the app on the Android platform. Five months later, Facebook released a new Android version, which resulted in not only reversing the signaling effect, but actually improving it.

The moral of the story? “Having visibility of the apps’ impact on mobile networks is key to reducing the cost of delivery and understanding apps that could be packaged to the benefits of all parties,” the report concluded.

Framework for network impact rankingsThe report laid out the following framework -- divided in four quadrants -- illustrating how the team categorized network impact rankings.

Not so fast, Kris. Network operators hate the growing capex. They are under a constant pressued to come up with a clever "data plan" package to sign up more subscribers, and yet they don't want caught flat footed by some surprise apps consuming lots of signaling in their network.

But the network providers will be happy if some apps use lots of bandwidth...consumers wil pay for it eventually...it remind me of Intel-Microsoft strategy of selling bloated software so you have to buy next gen just to keep up

Seriously, though, this report isn't just for consumers or for apps designers. It goes to the heart of the matter for those who are designig network gear, I believe. Take a look at those apps on the "watch list."

Those apps, once they catch on, could change what the next-gen communication equipment need to handle -- almost overnight.

As a consumer, we are mindful of which apps keep our phones running very hot. We've had our own suspicions... But this might be the first time we are seeing analytics on mobile apps' misbehavior -- in the form of rankings. It tells us which mobile apps are costing networks' bandwidth, consumers' battery and apps developers' chances to get bundled in the operators' packages.